UK producer and DJ Powell continues to blur the lines between contemporary club music, punk, and forward-thinking computer acid with Insomniac/Should've Been a Drummer. Describing the music is a challenging prospect... but dancing to it isn't. Both as an artist in his own right and through the music released on his Diagonal label, Oscar Powell has established himself among the 2010s' most singular, exciting artists. The music is tough, but always playful.

2016 repress. Powell's club-breaking series of 12" singles is now available on CD as 11-14, this killer, comprehensive two-CD collection. It charts the uncompromising development of one of this decade's most ruthless new artists through 18 original tracks taken from five EPs for three different labels -- including his own, Diagonal -- and features a searing collaboration with national noise treasure Russell Haswell. Syncing the muscle memory of late '90s drum and bass with a kink for the toughest '80s industrial and bleeding-edge electronics, Powell's music has emerged as a virile antidote to the conservatism of current dance music. With his first pair of self-released singles, The Ongoing Significance of Steel & Flesh (2011) and the Body Music EP (2012), he established an ascetic, bare-bones approach that resonated with the original no wave mantra -- "rip it up and start again" -- in a barefaced challenge to what was then deemed acceptable on the dancefloor. Precedent set, the controversial four-track Untitled EP (RAVE 002EP, 2013) revealed a more optimized, muscular take on his rollicking torque and freeform, caustic electronics at the cusp of the analog/digital schism. Late 2013 saw the coiled hard-step of Fizz and his most explicit alloys of motorik jungle-techno, before the Club Music EP (DIAG 009EP, 2014) combined all of these influences and exploded with spectacular, unpredictable brilliance, dosing a whole rave's worth of overloaded sensation into three brutally edited constructions, including the notorious "Maniac," starring label-mate and hardwave peer Russell Haswell. Central to it all, from the swaggering stomp of "Body Music" and "Oh No New York" to the deadly jag of "No U Turn," is a tensile, insatiable sense of urgency and a healthy disregard for convention. Mastered by Matt Colton.

2014 repress. This is Powell's keenly-awaited 12" for The Death Of Rave. "A Band" emphasizes a chimeric indistinction between the "real" textures of sample-spliced guitars and drums, and the gritted tension of painstakingly processed electronics, whereas "Acid" feels more like Bob Ostertag or Russell Haswell mangling Phuture. "Rider" is a nod to Suicide, yet sliced with the precision of prime period Dom & Optical, while "Oh No New York" is a sort of steampunk alternative to the perceived evolution of dance music.